Oedipus kills Laius

Oedipus kills King Laius in a sudden quarrel, unaware that Laius is his father. The act fulfils the oracle that had shaped Oedipus’s flight from what he believed was his home, and its eventual discovery turns an apparently distant crime into the key to Sophocles’ tragedy and Freud’s account of childhood wishes.

The Killing and the Oracle

Before Oedipus is born, an oracle tells Laius, King of Thebes, that his son will murder him. Laius and Jocasta abandon the infant, but Oedipus is rescued and raised as a king’s son at a foreign court. Later, when he consults the oracle about his origins, he is told to flee his home city: he will otherwise kill his father and marry his mother. Believing that the people who raised him are his parents, he sets out to avoid the prophecy.

On the road from his supposed home city, Oedipus encounters Laius and kills him in a sudden quarrel. The encounter is the prophecy’s first fulfilment, although Oedipus does not know the identity of the man he has killed or his relationship to him. That ignorance binds the murder to the larger sequence of his journey: he reaches Thebes, solves the Sphinx’s riddle, and is chosen as king, receiving Jocasta’s hand in marriage without knowing she is his mother.

The Crime Revealed

The killing does not immediately define Oedipus’s rule. He reigns in peace and dignity for years, and he and Jocasta have two sons and two daughters. The murder returns to the center of events only when plague strikes Thebes and the city seeks guidance from the oracle. The answer is that the plague will end when Laius’s murderer is driven from the land.

Sophocles’ tragedy follows the increasingly focused investigation of that crime. Its gradual, carefully delayed revelation resembles psychoanalysis: Oedipus discovers not only that he killed Laius, but that the dead king was his father and Jocasta is his mother. The investigation therefore reverses the apparent order of his life. The man seeking the source of Thebes’ crisis finds that its cause lies in an act he committed unknowingly, and that the feared prophecy has already been fulfilled.

Consequence and Significance

The discovery leaves Oedipus shattered by what he has done in ignorance. He blinds himself and leaves his homeland; in doing so, he departs as the oracle’s prediction is fully confirmed. The killing is thus both a literal act in the story and the concealed fact around which the tragedy’s revelation turns.

Freud reads the myth as more than a contest between divine fate and human will. Oedipus’s story moves its audience, he argues, because it brings to light wishes that belong to childhood more generally: the first sexual impulses directed toward the mother and the first hostile wishes against the father. In that interpretation, Oedipus’s killing of Laius is the fulfilment of a childhood wish. The audience recoils from the figure who has enacted it, while the gradual disclosure of his identity compels recognition of impulses that Freud says have been repressed and forgotten.